My partner and I were riding past the Harrison PATH stop. He noticed all the seemingly abandoned industrial buildings nearby and asked if I knew of any plans to turn them into living space/retail/office space. I don't. Does anyone else?
Railroad Forums
Building up Harrison neighborhood
- Discussion relating to the past and present operations of the NYC Subway, PATH, and Staten Island Railway (SIRT).
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Plans are for the new Red Bull Stadium which will house the Metro Stars. As for the old Hartz Mountain building, I'm not sure whats planned for the site. It's a huge facility and from an urban exploration point-of-view I'd hate to see it go.
Last edited by sullivan1985 on Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:35 pm, edited 4 times in total.
I love how we have all the money in the world to build brand new stadiums everywhere while American businesses are closing.
All Tickets Please! ......Means read another 2 paragraphs before reaching for your ticket
I believe that I remember reading somewhere that someone was going to be building residential building near the Harrison PATH station. This is part of the redevelopment plan.
Silvertrain, And, most stadiums are built with our personal local tax dollars. The cost of using the stadium by a team comes no way near ever paying for the cost of that initial investment. The rationale is that overall the stadium will produce sales tax dollars and related income to pay back the city/state. Rarely does it ever. But, because it's glitzy with a sports team, they will nearly always prevail over projects for transportation.
Besides, the politicians who support such stadium projects are almost always guaranteed premium box seats for the rest of their lives. Would free tickets on NJT sway the same people? Hardly.
Too, many shopping malls are built at no cost to the contractors or the stores that will occupy them. They were built by tax dollars.
It's one of the dark secrets of public financing today.
Besides, the politicians who support such stadium projects are almost always guaranteed premium box seats for the rest of their lives. Would free tickets on NJT sway the same people? Hardly.
Too, many shopping malls are built at no cost to the contractors or the stores that will occupy them. They were built by tax dollars.
It's one of the dark secrets of public financing today.
pdman wrote:The cost of using the stadium by a team comes no way near ever paying for the cost of that initial investment. The rationale is that overall the stadium will produce sales tax dollars and related income to pay back the city/state. Rarely does it ever. But, because it's glitzy with a sports team, they will nearly always prevail over projects for transportation.I'd agree with your theory only when the stadium is built in the middle of a swamp. Located in a city, stadiums bring people to a downtown center. Check out the Ironbound before a Devils game at Pru Center. Those are restaurant sales that would never had happened if the Pru Center didn't exist. Newark has a parking tax as well... which means the city is making tons of $$ off the parking fees. Newark also instituted a ticket surcharge to cover additional security and transportation related costs. An entire neighborhood (if you could even call it that) has changed where once a bunch of run down buildings, a failed shopping mall (thank you, Sharpe), razor wire-enclosed parking lots and rodents existed.
The Red Bull stadium has a lot of potential to do the same to an area of Harrison that didn't look so great. A dead area located right next to a seedy PATH station. With the stadium will come residential housing surrounding the area. The Harrison waterfront is being redeveloped with hundreds of new houses. Hopefully PATH will fix the station up. When the stadium isn't being used during the weekday... PARKING!
What does this have to do with NJT again?
D'oh! You're right, this should have been on the PATH forum instead of the NJT forum.
Mr. Moderator, would you mind moving this thread over to the right forum for it? Thank you!
Mr. Moderator, would you mind moving this thread over to the right forum for it? Thank you!
SILVERTRAIN wrote:I love how we have all the money in the world to build brand new stadiums everywhere while American businesses are closing.As geoffand pointed out, stadiums can be good for business in that they help stimulate the local economy as the Pru Center has.
Hopefully PATH will fix the station up.The Port Authority's 2008-2016 capital budget plan provides for a significant investment to "modernize" the Harrison PATH station.
There has been a great amount of residential building in Harrison, and more is in the works. Unfortunately, with the housing market (or should I say the mortgage market?) tightening, sales are very slow. The NYTimes had an article a couple of weeks ago about one developer who was so hard-up for a sale that he is offering to make the first years' mortgage payments for anyone who buys his townhouses.
To hell with the begrudgers!
All the pro-sports stadium people are missing the point. Of course they generate some economic activity, not zero. The point is that they generate less economic return over their entire lives than they cost to put in. If you want to stimulate the local economy, you should find a more efficient way to do it. Instead of getting less money than you're putting in, try something that at least breaks even.
See, e.g.: http://american.com/archive/2008/april- ... -subsidies. Mind you, this is not just one study. It's not even in question, where one study finds one thing, and another study finds another. As the article states, "the results are fairly constant from one analysis to another. There is little evidence of large increases in income or employment associated with the introduction of professional sports or the construction of new stadiums." Not that any of this matters -- nobody wants to listen to know-it-all economists. Gas tax holiday anyone?
Back to the topic of putting people near stations -- I've always wondered why the area around those train stations wasn't gentrifying. After all, portions of Brooklyn are now really hot real estate for Wall Street bankers who want more bang for the buck than in Manhattan. The subway network made that possible.
Real estate crunch or no, Manhattan is still an expensive place to live.
See, e.g.: http://american.com/archive/2008/april- ... -subsidies. Mind you, this is not just one study. It's not even in question, where one study finds one thing, and another study finds another. As the article states, "the results are fairly constant from one analysis to another. There is little evidence of large increases in income or employment associated with the introduction of professional sports or the construction of new stadiums." Not that any of this matters -- nobody wants to listen to know-it-all economists. Gas tax holiday anyone?
Back to the topic of putting people near stations -- I've always wondered why the area around those train stations wasn't gentrifying. After all, portions of Brooklyn are now really hot real estate for Wall Street bankers who want more bang for the buck than in Manhattan. The subway network made that possible.
Real estate crunch or no, Manhattan is still an expensive place to live.
taoyue wrote:All the pro-sports stadium people are missing the point. Of course they generate some economic activity, not zero. The point is that they generate less economic return over their entire lives than they cost to put in. If you want to stimulate the local economy, you should find a more efficient way to do it. Instead of getting less money than you're putting in, try something that at least breaks even.From the linked article
See, e.g.: http://american.com/archive/2008/april- ... -subsidies. Mind you, this is not just one study. It's not even in question, where one study finds one thing, and another study finds another. As the article states, "the results are fairly constant from one analysis to another. There is little evidence of large increases in income or employment associated with the introduction of professional sports or the construction of new stadiums." Not that any of this matters -- nobody wants to listen to know-it-all economists. Gas tax holiday anyone?
Back to the topic of putting people near stations -- I've always wondered why the area around those train stations wasn't gentrifying. After all, portions of Brooklyn are now really hot real estate for Wall Street bankers who want more bang for the buck than in Manhattan. The subway network made that possible.
Real estate crunch or no, Manhattan is still an expensive place to live.
The principal criticism of research finding no net economic boon from stadiums is that downtown stadiums are likely to have larger benefits than suburban stadiums. Yet this analysis is heavily influenced by stadiums constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s, which were located predominantly in the suburbs. For example, Thomas Chema, former executive director of Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corporation, says that the value of stadiums “as catalysts for economic development...depends upon where they are located and how they are integrated into a metropolitan area’s growth strategy.”The details are extremely important, especially in the Prudential Center case. The stadium is in the central business district. Since 40+% of attendees arrive by mass transit (due in part to Newark's traffic and limited traffic) they provide a significant amount of foot traffic that creates business opportunities for local investment in business along the way. This is not the case with stadiums in which patrons almost exclusively arrive by car. Additionally, since neither rail station is directly at the stadium or even at the edge of the stadium property, this increases the amount of the foot traffic along city streets.
Economists Rob Baade (Lake Forest College), Mimi Nikolova (Lake Forest College), and Victor Matheson (College of the Holy Cross) provide stark visual evidence in support of this argument, comparing the impact of Chicago’s Wrigley Field and U.S. Cellular Field. The economic development possibilities near U.S. Cellular Field are obviously limited by the vast parking lot and multilane highway that surround the stadium. City and regional planners Arthur C. Nelson (Virginia Tech University) and Charles Santo (University of Memphis) each find that teams that play in the central business district of a city tend to be associated with an increase in the metropolitan area’s share of the regional income.
At the regional level there are other impacts. How does moving Devils games to an area with high transit accessibility effect regional traffic congestion (which has a large economic impact). The transit usage that Pru center has had important impacts on the viability of increased transit service. For example, the opening of Pru center provided justification for the addition of a number of late night express trains on the NEC.
I'm a summer intern with PA, and one of my fellow interns in the design department says he's currently working on a small part of a huge project to redevelop the current Harrison Station.
I stated how one side looked pretty good in the older building style, while the other entrance looks like an outhouse with stairs in it! lol
I stated how one side looked pretty good in the older building style, while the other entrance looks like an outhouse with stairs in it! lol
"Q Towah!" - Last of a dying breed
Here's the page about the new development to go alongside Red Bull Park:
http://www.riverbenddistrict.com/
P.S. I hope NJT/PANYNJ/the Red Bulls have a plan to get people from the M&E line to Red Bull park without having to pay for 3 different lines and make two connections (M&E line to NLR to PATH?) Can there be a Harrison stop on the M&E for game days? I'm not a soccer fan or anything, but I'd love to see the new stadium in person once or twice when it opens without a major hassle.
http://www.riverbenddistrict.com/
P.S. I hope NJT/PANYNJ/the Red Bulls have a plan to get people from the M&E line to Red Bull park without having to pay for 3 different lines and make two connections (M&E line to NLR to PATH?) Can there be a Harrison stop on the M&E for game days? I'm not a soccer fan or anything, but I'd love to see the new stadium in person once or twice when it opens without a major hassle.
fredct wrote:P.S. I hope NJT/PANYNJ/the Red Bulls have a plan to get people from the M&E line to Red Bull park without having to pay for 3 different lines and make two connections (M&E line to NLR to PATH?) Can there be a Harrison stop on the M&E for game days? I'm not a soccer fan or anything, but I'd love to see the new stadium in person once or twice when it opens without a major hassle.I really hope that they build a pedestrian bridge from Newark Penn Station to the Stadium, taking the PATH train from Newark to Harrison would be ridiculous.